May 13, 2024

All the Light Shrimp Cannot See

Whew, what a busy month for me.

...wait, it's been two months since the last newsletter? Whoops, sorry about that. I appreciated everyone suggesting science topics—I'm planning a whole dark matter week about the cosmological problem it helps solve—but then I wandered off. In my defense, I had a story come out in Strange Horizons, prepared our magazine's Kickstarter to fund year two, and wrote extensions for Chapbook, a Twine story format.

But never mind all of that. Let's talk about mantis shrimp.

She's Got Mantis Shrimpy Eyes

Eyes fascinate me. Between becoming ridiculously near-sighted as a kid and spending a lot of my career working with camera systems and image recognition algorithms, it's no surprise that I'm intrigued by how vision systems work. That's why I was so excited to learn that mantis shrimp can see sixteen colors.

This is, to use the scientific term, wild. We see three colors thanks to the color-receptive cones in our eyes that respond to (roughly) red, green, and blue light. The mantis shrimp have twelve to sixteen color-receptive cones. They see color so much. This fun animal fact was notably popularized by cartoonist Matthew Inman in his cartoon about why the mantis shrimp was his new favorite animal.

There's only one problem: mantis shrimp can't tell a lot of colors apart. Even worse, this information has been available since 2014.

I have spent the past decade telling people lies about mantis shrimp.

I'll get back to that last bit. Right now, I want to look at how researchers determined that mantis shrimp have less ability to tell colors apart than a humanities-hating STEM booster. Researchers trained the mantis shrimp to pick one color from another by giving them a prawn when they picked the right color. As long as the wrong color's wavelength was 50 to 100 nanometers away from the right one, the mantis shrimp could reliably pick out the right color and chow down on prawn. But as the researchers used wrong colors that were closer and closer to the right one, the mantis shrimp stopped being able to pick out the right color.

In theory, if the mantis shrimp's visual system was comparing colors to each other, they'd be able to distinguish colors whose wavelengths were separated by less than 1 to 5 nm. However, once the wrong and right colors' wavelengths were less than 12 to 25 nm apart, the mantis shrimp failed the test.

It turns out that mantis shrimp are good at recognizing colors but not discriminating them. Comparing one color to another, like we do, requires a lot of mental processing. Mantis shrimp, as the researchers say, live "a rapid-fire lifestyle of combat and territoriality." Being able to recognize individual colors quickly without spending the extra time discriminating them provides an evolutionary advantage.

This is science operating the way we'd hope. Researchers discovered that mantis shrimp had many more color receptors in their eyes than other creatures. The obvious conclusion—the one I and so many other people jumped to—is that they see way more colors than humans do. Those researchers didn't stop with that conclusion. They kept experimenting, and in doing so they learned that mantis shrimp don't see those additional colors the same way we do. They see more individual colors, but they can't distinguish among them as finely as we can.

Let's go back to the lies I've been telling people about mantis shrimp. The story I learned and told others was simple: mantis shrimp see more colors than us. Reality is more complex. But that complexity is arguably even more interesting. Mantis shrimp likely have all of those color-detecting cones because they don't stare to find predators or prey. They turn and twist their eye stalks in intricate motions to look for flashes of color. In that context, being able to see more individual colors is more important than being able to distinguish color differences. What's more, mantis shrimp can see polarized light. Their eyes respond to both linear and polarized light like they're wearing polarizing sunglasses. Moving their eye stalks lets them extract information from light polarization in ways we can't.

I'd argue that the story of mantis shrimp eyes, and how we learned what they do, is an interesting glimpse into both the natural world and how science operates. It's one I'm looking forward to telling in place of "omg mantis shrimp see amazing rainbows!"

What's Up With Stephen?

I have a new short story out! In "The Jaxicans' Authentic Reconstruction of Taco Tuesday #37," Mike is resurrected by far-future aliens to work his shitty fast food restaurant job. It's about existential despair and why we do what we do and what it means for something to be authentic. It's also absurd and (in my estimation) fun. I'd love for you to read it.

Small Wonders year one is wrapping up. We've published 36 new pieces of flash fiction, 36 new poems, and 36 re-printed stories. Along the way we've had aliens accidentally killing a researcher, biblically-accurate angels visiting a child trying to understand their gender, and a magician who uses the power of the Great Beyond to command a guy to stop visiting them even if his ass looks heavenly in those leather pants. We've had a heck of a first year. We'd like to have a second. If you're so inclined, please back our Year Two Kickstarter. We've got really neat stuff on offer.

Vibe Check

• Come for the fine art pet portraits, stay for the amazing painting of actor Alan Tudyk's three dogs victorious over their enemies.

• Why does everything in visual culture look kinda the same? (See also.)

• Speaking of filters and algorithms, Jia Tolentino hid her pregnancy from the algorithms and also reported on the rise of baby surveillance.

• And still speaking of filters and algorithms, 404 Media continues to do bang-up reporting, this time on Facebook's AI spam and the rise of the zombie internet.

• It's Meltdown May!!!

• A look at the Beijing Auto Show and the state of Chinese electric vehicles. Even Tesla appears to be shrugging and giving up on the Chinese consumer market.

• Please do not let Neuralink put anything in your brain.

• Similarly, please do not buy the Rabbit R1 pin that acts as an AI assistant.

Finally, here's the best video game mod ever.